The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old French phrase, _En avant!_ It carries all of the old Saxon command, Forward!! It means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of a real personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the world. What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it lie?

When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the mouth

The customary method of studying history by means of a series of events and dates is not the method which we have chosen to employ in this study of the Old West. Speaking generally, our minds are unable to assimilate a condensed mass of events and dates; and that is precisely what would be required of us if we should attempt here to follow the ways of conventional history. Dates are at best no more than milestones on the pathway of time; and in the present instance it is not the milestones but t

The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude. We pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we see the red hills and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into huge indefinite shapes, to which even a small imagination may give a human or more than human form. It would almost seem that the same great hand which chiseled out these monumental forms had also laid its fingers upon the people of this region and fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the ster

If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the development of the frontier region found by the first railways, it should not be concluded that this upthrust of the southern cattle constituted the only contribution to the West of that day. There were indeed earlier influences, the chief of which was the advent of the wild population of the placer mines. The riches of the gold-fields hastened the building of the first transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their mark

Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which make chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back upon the path of chronology, and take up the great early highways of the West—what we might call the points of attack against the frontier. The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once was on the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday presented the most romantic and appealin

It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages that, although we undertook to speak of the last American frontier, all that we really thus far have done has been to describe a series of frontiers from the Missouri westward. In part this is true. But it was precisely in this large, loose, and irregular fashion that we actually arrived at our last frontier. Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced by any steady or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating

It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the Plains. The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone, but are soon to pass. Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide, open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all

His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old story of the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from the first destined to win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back of the vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier frontiers. The same story now was being written on the frontier of the Plains. But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The mill

ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903. "The Outlet," 1905. Homely but excellently informing books done by a man rarely qualified for his task by long experience in the cattle business and on the trail. Nothing better exists than Adams's several books for the man who wishes trustworthy information on the early American cattle business. GEORGE A. FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900. GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895. EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Cowboy," 1897. CHARL